


Wanderlust

by WarpedYouth



Category: The Aristocats (1970)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Community: disney_kink, Duchess and co don't show up until the end, F/M, M/M, This is mostly Thomas with original characters in case the summary didn't clue you in, Thomas O'Malley has serious abandonment issues, also potentially ridiculous French geography, lots of timeskips, seriously so many timeskips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 23:16:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20479076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WarpedYouth/pseuds/WarpedYouth
Summary: Inspired by the (years-old) prompt: "Human!AU; Thomas O'Malley drifting across France leaving a trail of heart broken but satisfied women and men behind him".





	Wanderlust

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the (years-old) prompt: "Human!AU; Thomas O'Malley drifting across France leaving a trail of heart broken but satisfied women and men behind him" at the disney_kink LJ/Dreamwidth site.
> 
> Disclaimer: The only thing I own are the OCs.

If there was one thing Thomas O’Malley had always known about himself, it was that he wasn’t one for staying put. For a child left to fend for himself as he was, it was purely a survival mechanism – easier to remain unseen if you kept moving, dashing through streets and between stalls at markets taking whatever he could and never once stopping. As he grew, it developed more into a desire to just _see_, to always be experiencing something new. It was something he both hated and loved in himself – especially when he just wanted to enjoy whatever new partner he’d found - but it was intrinsically _him_.

He’d first realised it at seventeen, after a week of staying in a farm cottage on the outskirts of Rouen and (somehow) ending up in the bed of his hosts’ daughter. It was a clumsy, somewhat uncomfortable and altogether incredibly awkward experience, but at the end of it when the pair were lying curled in each other’s arms and she was snoring quietly beside him, he thought for the first time what might happen if he chose to stay. Within an hour, he was sneaking out of the door, a small bag packed with what little belongings he had, a frankly pitiful sum of money and whatever food he had quickly been able to take from the kitchen. He often wondered what had happened to that girl – she had been nice, even if he could barely remember her name within two weeks of leaving.

When he got to Rouen, he quickly realised life was much better when you had a decent place to shut the rest of the world out. Emilie was a young waitress who had let an offer of a free sandwich while her manager’s back was turned escalate to a somewhat nervous invitation back to her admittedly small apartment. Thomas would remember for years afterwards that she seemed most taken by his red hair, forever running her fingers through it as though he were a cat in constant need of petting. Not that he minded all that much – he had somewhere to stay and she was left satisfied. It had been a perfectly mutually beneficial relationship, which was why it still pained him that she’d had to ruin it with her questions of “what they meant to each other”. In the end, he’d really had no choice but to leave.

The same night he left Emilie, he’d met Armand. He’d never before dreamed of feeling the same for a man as he did for a woman – beyond the occasional appreciative glance – but the young gendarme had been ridiculously adorable, attempting to shift Thomas from the doorway he’d decided was refuge enough for what remained of the night in a manner that suggested having any kind of authority was entirely new to him. Thomas had originally merely intended his charm to be a means of getting out of trouble, but as seemed to happen with him, things naturally escalated until Thomas had Armand sandwiched between himself and the wall of the building whose doorway had started the whole mess. In all honesty, the encounter was over far quicker than either of them would have liked, so Thomas remained in Rouen a while longer, finding excuses over the next year to keep bumping into Armand. There were never many words shared between them, and relatively little romance, but it never seemed to stop Armand from gazing at him with such adoration in his glass-green eyes each time they met that Thomas eventually couldn’t stand it and left the town – and two more shattered hearts – behind him.

On his way south, barely a few miles from Le Mans, he met a carriage that oddly decided to slow to match his pace and eventually came to a halt beside him. Seated inside, a fairly elderly couple, and quite well off if Thomas were to judge based on the size of the woman’s hat, insisted on asking who he was and where he was headed. He was rewarded with an offer of a ride, as well as a couple of nights’ stay at the couple’s home, and Thomas gratefully accepted. As he had suspected, the pair were fairly rich with a sizeable home – Thomas even had the novelty (for him) of a room to himself. The pair seemed quite taken with him and, on inspecting the home, it was clear why. A picture over a mantlepiece showed a young man, his face dimpled and smiling. The couple’s son had appeared to look undeniably similar to Thomas and, despite having disappeared many years earlier to the clutches of various false friends while he had been studying in Paris who had evidently been more interested in bleeding the boy of his money than anything else, the pair clearly retained the hope that one day, their son might reappear to them. It was the only time Thomas had truly regretted his urge to keep moving on and he often found himself wondering if the kind old couple had ever regained their lost son.

Between Le Mans and Orleans, he moved quickly: Cécile, Marguerite, Guillaume, Armelle, Jean-Baptiste, Édouard, Jeanette… He barely stayed with any of them for more than two nights, the experiences kept fun and emotionally distant by both parties. He had needed somewhere to sleep, they had wanted it to be with them – it reminded him of the early days in Rouen when he’d first met Emilie. Then one day in Orleans, he came across a frankly mesmorising woman and things had started heading downhill again.

To be fair, she _had_ wasted relatively little time informing him that she happened to be married, but given that she’d had him pinned against the wall in a shabby hotel room and they were both already half undressed when she told him so, Thomas liked to think he could be forgiven for not really processing the implications of the information. That first time between them had been one of the most astonishing afternoons of Thomas’ life until that point and the two of them had fallen into a routine so neatly that he was sure it couldn’t have been the first occurrence of her organising something like this. For almost eighteen months, the pair would spend long afternoons and evenings together in a tiny apartment Thomas had found. In between their bouts of (Thomas was proud to admit) typically very energetic lovemaking, Auriane would hold him close, calling him her ‘little tomcat’, and whisper breathless desires of running away together to Paris, of leaving her husband and Orleans behind and never looking back. For almost eighteen months, he was able to ignore the whispers and silence them with kisses, until one particular afternoon rolled around. For the first time since the night in the farmers’ cottage all those years ago, Thomas imagined what his life would be like with someone else sharing it. And, to his horror, he found that when he pictured running to Paris with Auriane, he didn’t really mind the idea. He hadn’t waited for her to fall asleep or when her back was turned as he had with everyone else. He had instantly shot out of their bed, ignoring her questions in favour of concentrating on just _getting out_. When she stood before him, clinging to him with a desperation that made him want to run anywhere far away, for the first time he truly became cruel. He’d thrown her marriage at her like a weapon – for that final time they were together, the passion between them made things far too hard and fast and cold, with him whispering endless curses against her and the two of them gripping each other so tight it was almost painful, then practically tearing apart from each other when they were done. He’d only paused long enough to do up his trousers before he’d gone and she had been left weeping on the floor. He hadn’t left Orleans at that point – he’d made it about five streets away from his apartment before realising it really wasn’t sensible to leave all his belongings behind. A couple of hours later found him returning to the apartment…and to a man whom he could only guess was Auriane’s husband. It hadn’t been a _fair_ fight, by any means – the man had surprised Thomas and Auriane had neglected to ever mention how big he was – but that night, Thomas had limped away from Orleans leaving yet another broken heart in the distance behind him.

He headed to Paris, deciding that Auriane’s whispers had made him quite intrigued by the sound of the place after all; just as long as he wasn’t _with_ anyone. Two years later found him by a small café with a gang of other drifters he had come across upon entering the city. He had told them of his plans to move on elsewhere and they’d insisted on giving him a proper send-off. The others were all happily playing their music to the mixed amusement and annoyance of those Parisians nearby while Thomas occasionally joined in singing and tapping out a beat on the table in front of him. This was the life he was meant for, he was certain of it. Care-free and nothing tying him down. He smirked as he locked eyes with a blushing young man across the street – he and Matthieu had been casually meeting each other the past few evenings and, though he felt oddly sad about the prospect of abandoning Matthieu to the sneers of his parents whom Thomas had overheard more than once telling their son to beware of his ‘bad influence’ (a warning that only ever led to increasing the speed with which the pair ended up in each other’s arms as well as increasing the obscenity of the noises they ended up making), he considered himself gentleman enough to give the lad something to remember. Ignoring the jeers and calls of his friends, plus the obnoxious tooting of a trumpet, he and Matthieu soon left the group to enjoy their last night together.

A month later, on a normally quiet country road just outside Paris, Thomas O’Malley was awakened from his restless sleep under a tree, which sheltered him from the worst of the rain, by the distant sound of a vehicle repeatedly backfiring. He’d spent the past week in the very pleasant company of a young woman in a small village, but he couldn’t ignore the odd yearning to be back in Paris. He’d told his new companion and, though she had cried, they had spent their last night together just talking, discussing everything and nothing in the way that two people can when they know they will never see the other person again. As she had told him of her desire for a family – and fear that it would never be possible being as old as she was and without any sign of a potential husband – something had stirred deep inside Thomas. His entire life, he had been alone, had _wanted_ to be alone. How many opportunities of some kind of family of his own had he desperately torn himself free from..? He even found himself wondering of the various women he’d shared a bed with on his travels – the young farm girl, Emilie, Cécile, Marguerite, Armelle, Jeanette, _Auriane_ – might any of them have even borne him a _child_ after he’d gone? And would he even have any way of knowing? The thoughts had made him inexplicably sad and had also set the roots of a startling realisation within him. He no longer wanted to be alone so desperately. The mere thought of someone forever beside him no longer seemed the terror that had prompted him to sneak away in the dark as it had so many years earlier. In fact, Paris itself now seemed to him to be something resembling a home, much as it had become for his friends. The two had parted the next morning with a surprisingly chaste kiss, each sincerely wishing the other luck for the future.

Having determined that the worst of the rain was now over, he ventured out from under his tree to continue his journey back to Paris, singing a song he’d made up years ago, when he came across the odd sight of a woman and her three young children, all dressed in fine clothes that marked them distinctly out of place in the countryside they were currently in. “Please, Monsieur O’Malley,” the woman said, her voice sounding musical to his ears even as she begged, “won’t you help us back to Paris?”

And as he took in her big blue eyes and her children’s adoring faces as they peered up at him despite how unappealing he knew he must look to these characters that must have been used to seeing nothing but beauty, he knew that no amount of fear of the future would ever tear him from their side.


End file.
